This invention relates generally to a tightly integrated parallel printing architecture containing at least a first print engine and a second print engine and more particularly concerns calibration system for maintaining uniform gloss characteristics between printed images generated by the first print engine and the second print engine.
In the office equipment industry, different customers have different requirements as to their business relationship with the manufacturer of the equipment or other service provider. For various reasons, some customers may wish to own their equipment, such as copiers and printers, outright, and take full responsibility for maintaining and servicing the equipment. At the other extreme, some customers may wish to have a “hands off” approach to their equipment, wherein the equipment is leased, and the manufacturer or service provider takes the entire responsibility of keeping the equipment maintained. In such a “hands off” situation, the customer may not even want to know the details about when the equipment is being serviced, and further it is likely that the manufacturer or service provider will want to know fairly far in advance when maintenance is necessary for the equipment, so as to minimize “down time.” Other business relationships between the “owning” and “leasing” extremes may be imagined, such as a customer owning the equipment but engaging the manufacturer or service provider to maintain the equipment on a renewable contract basis.
A common trend in the maintenance of office equipment, particularly copiers and printers, is to organize the machine on a modular basis, wherein certain distinct subsystems of a machine are bundled together into modules which can be readily removed from machines and replaced with new modules of the same type. A modular design facilitates a great flexibility in the business relationship with the customer. By providing subsystems in discrete modules, visits from a service representative can be made very short, since all the representative has to do is remove and replace a defective module. Actual repair of the module takes place away at the service provider's premises. Further, some customers may wish to have the ability to buy modules “off the shelf,” such as from an office supply store. Indeed, it is possible that a customer may lease the machine and wish to buy a succession of modules as needed.
In order to facilitate a customer demand for even higher productivity and speed has been required of these image recording apparatuses. However, the respective systems have their own speed limits and if an attempt is made to provide higher speeds, numerous problems will occur and/or larger and more bulky apparatuses must be used to meet the higher speed demands. The larger and bulkier apparatuses, i.e. high speed printers, typically represent a very expensive and perhaps uneconomical apparatus. The expense of these apparatuses along with their inherent complexity can only be justified by the small percentage of extremely high volume printing customers. Therefore the utilization of plurality of print engine modules (IMEs) to provide higher printing speeds are highly desirable, such a system is disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/924,459 entitled “PARALLEL PRINTING ARCHITECTURE CONSISTING OF CONTAINERIZED IMAGE MARKING ENGINE MODULES”.
In tightly integrated parallel printing, machines have multiple fusers in a system so the generally low reliability of color fusers is a major concern for such systems. A second important consideration for these systems is gloss uniformity from fuser to fuser. Due to the tolerances in manufacturing, fuser conditions and components, deviation in gloss from marking engine to marking engine vary thereby providing a system to accomplish uniform gloss in a parallel printing system is an acute need.